CatDV Now Supports Cloud Workflows
WARWICK, U.K. — April 19, 2017 — At the 2017 NAB Show, Square Box Systems today announced powerful new enhancements to its industry-leading CatDV media asset management (MAM) solution. Through a dedicated professional services offering, Square Box Systems is now offering customers the ability to deploy CatDV in a fully cloud-based workflow. In addition, CatDV now includes new ease-of-use and efficiency features, such as a subclip downloader for easier sharing and reuse of H.264 video clips, and a new file path cleaner for removing special characters in file and folder names.
With the new professional services offering, Square Box Systems is offering customers powerful tools and service for configuring cloud workflows to enable asset storage, metadata management, and asset search.
“In increasing numbers, our customers are asking for the ability to leverage cloud services in their CatDV MAM operations. We made an important first step in that direction last year, with the release of CatDV Archive to S3 Cloud,” said Dave Clack, CEO, Square Box Systems. “And now, with this pro services offering, we’re giving our customers even greater workflow flexibility along with the increased cost savings and efficiencies enabled by cloud services.”
The new subclip downloader gives CatDV users the ability to trim H.264 video clips to show only the marked content. For efficient sharing and reuse of clips, this offers a marked improvement over previous processes in which users were required to download an entire clip in order to share a specific segment or subclip. In one example, a user wanting to share only a small segment of a football game would have to download footage of the entire game. With the subclip downloader, users can trim the clip to the desired footage on the fly and then download and share only the needed subclip.
CatDV’s new file path cleaner solves a familiar problem — the inability of many tools in the media workflow to handle “special characters” in file and folder names, such as commas, spaces, and non-alpha-numeric symbols. Whereas in the past these characters would cause issues with file-achiving systems or translation issues between Mac, Windows, and Linux paths, the new CatDV feature is able to clean the file paths on ingest or on demand for master, mezzanine, and proxy assets, and then re-link the content in the CatDV MAM system.
“Both the new subclip downloader and file path cleaner seem, on their face, to be simple improvements — but in reality both features solve tremendous challenges for our customers,” Clack said. “Using the subclip downloader, users are able to rapidly grab just the clip segments they need and share them with other users, which not only adds new efficiencies but creates significant savings in network bandwidth. And, visit any busy production facility and you’ll see that users are having to spend many hours every day manually correct incompatibilities in file names. CatDV’s new file path cleaner is a huge time-saver because it makes these file path woes a thing of the past and helps file archiving workflows run much smoother.”